A friend of mine asked me to look into the Tilly family of Rabun County, Georgia a few weeks ago. While doing so, I ran across the last will and testament of Lazarus Tilly, which was written November 30, 1839 and proven in court during the March Term, 1841, in Rabun County.1 In his will, Lazarus named his wife, Sarah, and children Alfred Tilly, Elizabeth Millender, Polly Calwell, Margaret Owens, Lewis Tilly, John Tilly, and Nancy Holcombe.

In and of itself the will does not seem strange, but further research into contemporary court records illuminates an oddity: two of the named children were deceased at the time Lazarus wrote his will.

Warrant Issued 7th day April 1870 Returned 7th April 1870 with the defendant [J. M. Dills] arrested by W. A. Shepherd. She [Mary E. Payne] come up on evidence of the prosecuter that the said child was born in the State of Georgia where its mother was at the time domiciled.

The child’s name is not mentioned, and repeated attempts to find Mary Payne in the 1870 US Census in both Macon County and nearby Rabun Co., GA, have proved fruitless.

John Chipman of Pittsylvania Co., VA (part 2) from acme nuklear blimp. I was particularly interested in this because of a name that caught my eye near the bottom of the article: one Thos. Dillard witnessed this document. My interest in the Dillard family is two-fold. First, my brother-in-law is a Dillard from nearby Dillard, GA. Secondly, the Dillards were among that group who emigrated from Buncombe Co., NC through Haywood and Macon Counties to Rabun Co., GA and settled in the Little Tennessee River Valley of that county.

It is through the previous blog that I found the next link, the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, which is exactly what it sounds like, a database of Anglo-Saxons living in England from the “late sixth to the early eleventh century”. Even though I’ll never actually use that database, I found the idea of it incredibly interesting.

I recently bought several back issues of the NGS NewsMagazine from a fellow researcher, and have been diligently combing through them for research and record tips. I’ve run across some really good finds, too, but the topic of today’s post comes from the article “Charting Your Priorities” by Susan Zacharias (January/February/March 2007, pp. 54 – 56). In short, Zacharias offers a method of prioritizing research by listing end-of-lines (that is, the earliest known generation in every direct line) in various fonts according to their place on the pedigree chart. Your largest font size (Zacharias recommends 18 point) would correspond to your most recent (chronologically) dead end, with each step down in fonts corresponding to one generation further back in time.